Sad Dating Apps: Emotional Technological Determinism and Agency in Late Modernity

Abstract

Grim cultural diagnoses suggest that dating apps make their users feel sad, attributing this to the commodification of intimacy facilitated by digital technology. Dating apps are charged with offering an illusory sense of choice among abundant partners and providing tools for atomizing people and filtering through them, while many caution against the growing dependency on dating apps. Drawing on 30 interviews with Polish LGBTQ people living in the United Kingdom, this article challenges the conflation of dating apps with sadness by distinguishing between “sad dating apps” and “sad dating app users.” I show that users exercise complex forms of agency in recognizing the flaws of digital dating cultures and engaging with them creatively. I argue for research that moves beyond relatively privileged users and global dating apps to better understand the role of digital technologies in society, particularly at the intersection of emotions and agency. While Internet researchers have become more careful in avoiding technologically deterministic arguments when assessing technologies’ general impact or their “effects,” crude claims about how technologies make their users feel persist, which I refer to as emotional technological determinism. More broadly, my research not only underscores the greater agency of users in this respect but also delineates the forms, scales, and scopes of feelings, sometimes contradictory, that technologies provoke, which technologies provoke what feelings, and for whom. Emotions themselves can be more or less agential, and the agency over how one feels when interacting with technology is distributed between technologies, users, and contexts.

Introduction

There is something sad about dating apps. Or so it seems, judging by media headlines that declare: “Sad, paranoid and still single: How the dating app destroyed us all” (Hendy, 2023), or “Troye Sivan on dating in the digital age: ‘I’m off the apps—I’m depressed by them’” (Tabberer, 2023). An analysis of more than 6000 English-language news articles led Albury et al. (2020) to conclude that the media consistently positioned dating apps as a “social problem.” While coverage often focused on sexual health, crime, harassment, and privacy, “mental health was raised as an issue for many app users in relation to anxiety, loneliness, and depression, and as a barrier to authenticity, intimacy, and sociality” (p. 239).

Survey-based psychological studies reach similar conclusions, correlating dating app use with anxiety, distress, and depression, while more frequent or prolonged use is associated with greater negative outcomes (e.g. Freire et al., 2023; Holtzhausen et al., 2020). Multiple nuances qualify these findings, and one recent contribution acknowledges that “dating apps bear some mental health costs, although not to the extent and for the reasons previously imagined” (Potarca & Sauter, 2023, abstract). Nevertheless, similar to popular media reports, psychological literature paints a grim overall picture, establishing a clear correlation, if not always a direct causation, between dating app use and feeling sad.

Sociologists and anthropologists, who situate digital dating within broader transformations of intimacy, offer equally pessimistic accounts. Bauman (2003) famously diagnosed the late-modern condition of “liquid love,” marked by a simultaneous “desperate” desire for connection and a reluctance to commit. Although dating apps are not central to his analysis, he mentions “computer dating” as intensifying this tendency by making relationships easy to enter and easy to exit, describing the process as “shopping for partners on the internet” (p. 65). The commodification of intimacy is further critiqued by Illouz (2007) regarding dating sites and by Essig (2019) and Orchard (2024) concerning dating apps, the latter pointedly titling her book Sticky, Sexy, Sad: Swipe Culture and the Darker Side of Dating Apps.

I began this article with grim cultural diagnoses that link digital dating to negative emotions, reflecting what seems to be a widespread perception that digital dating leaves its users feeling unhappy. Many of the accounts draw on what I call emotional technological determinism, the idea that technologies make their users feel a certain way as a result of their design. For instance, in Sad by Design, Lovink (2019) argues that “sadness is integrated into the design of interfaces and the architectures of apps” (p. 51), illustrating this claim with examples from popular dating apps Tinder and OKCupid. Similarly, in Sticky, Sexy, Sad, Orchard (2024) maintains that experiences with another popular dating app, Bumble, “are common enough to suggest that they’re shaped by the design of the app itself” (p. 11). Psychologists tend to more carefully distinguish between correlation and causation, while sociologists often frame digital dating as co-constructing and amplifying the commodification of intimacy. Yet, even in these latter cases, the repeated association of dating platforms (i.e. diverse digital dating services, including dating sites and apps) with sadness causes the emotion to “stick” to them (Ahmed, 2004). Thus, although some authors stop short of outright determinism, the lingering impression remains that something intrinsic to dating platforms makes their users feel sad.

Sadness is a complicated and capacious emotion, encompassing fleeting moments of feeling bad, deteriorating mental health, and deep or prolonged unhappiness that borders on melancholy. Following Frevert (2024), I use the terms emotions and feelings rather than affect, as my focus is on the politics of their everyday use—particularly how they are mobilized to critique the emotional toll of technology, often in technologically deterministic ways. I challenge the common conflation of dating apps with feeling sad by interrogating it from the perspective of cultural studies. Drawing on 30 interviews with Polish LGBTQs living in the United Kingdom, I foreground their agency and situate their dating practices within specific social and cultural contexts. My focus on queer migrants enables me to question the frequently universalized claim that dating apps make their users sad, exposing how such an argument rests on assumptions that apply primarily to relatively privileged users and global dating apps.

The following section examines why digital dating is often associated with sadness. I focus on Illouz’s (2007) seminal thesis on emotional capitalism, which has become foundational for scholarship locating the pitfalls of digital intimacy in processes of commodification. Building on Illouz (2007, 2012), I address how the abundance of potential partners online and the atomization of individuals into discrete attributes generate emotional challenges. From this perspective, sadness is understood as a by-product of the rationalization and efficiency logics embedded in dating app design. I also engage with more recent extensions of Illouz’s work that shift attention from dating sites to apps and consider the claims about the growing dependency on digital dating. I then describe my methods, participants, and ethics. The subsequent findings are presented in three sections, addressing issues of abundance, atomization, and dependency. In the Conclusion, I critique reductive generalizations that position dating apps as inherently sadness-inducing, arguing that such claims are often based on reflections about relatively privileged users and globally dominant platforms. Instead, I offer a contextualized account of digital dating, emphasizing my contribution to a wide-ranging discussion on technology, emotions, and agency by cautioning against easy slippage into emotional technological determinism.

Dating Apps and Emotional Capitalism

In Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation, Illouz (2012) sets out to analyze “the misery of love” (p. 1) and its new configurations in late modernity. Already in her earlier work, Illouz (2007) demonstrates how popular psychologizing (discourses of self-work, therapy, and emotions) and the logic of the market economy—key characteristics of emotional capitalism—have become naturalized in everyday life, including dating. She discusses dating sites as contributing to rationalizing dating by transforming it into a calculable process of personal choice and self-marketing in the context of an abundance of competing dating candidates. Illouz (2012) dubs dating sites technologies of interchangeability “that expand the pool of choices, enable the rapid move from one partner to another, and set up criteria for comparing partners and for comparing oneself to others” (p. 183). Thus, dating sites are conceptualized as contributing to the commodification of intimacy, which brings misery.

A key mechanism through which dating platforms foster commodification is by making visible the abundance of potential partners. Illouz (2012) contrasts the pre-modern governance of desire, regulated by the economy of scarcity, with the late-modern economy of abundance (p. 244). Essig (2019), writing about dating apps, similarly emphasizes the seemingly endless pool of potential partners, requiring users to “slog through hundreds, even thousands, of dating profiles” (p. 58), and notes that “choice can make us far less happy” (p. 80). The abundant choice enabled by digital dating is linked to sadness because it causes less certainty and security in any choice made (Carter & Arocha, 2020) and makes potential partners interchangeable (Essig, 2019). While choice may suggest greater agency, within this framework, a dating app user “is burdened with the responsibility of picking the best possible partner, and has only his or herself to blame if the endeavour fails” (Bandinelli & Gandini, 2022, p. 424). Bandinelli and Bandinelli (2021) highlight the illusory nature of freedom that such abundant choice creates by concluding that “the individual is free to choose, and obliged to choose freely” (p. 184).

The abundant choice available on dating platforms is often assumed, reflecting a bias toward relatively privileged users. Illouz’s (2007, 2012, 2019) own analyses draw primarily on heterosexual, middle-class people residing in Western urban contexts. Research on queer dating challenges this assumption. While gay men in metropolitan centers may experience a similar “over-abundance of connections” (Chan, 2018, p. 2574), many queers describe conditions of scarcity of potential partners on dating apps, particularly queer women (Duguay, 2019) and queers in rural areas (McKearney, 2021). My own research builds on this work, examining how additional cultural factors constrain the pool of potential partners. This perspective calls into question who is in a relatively privileged position to feel “burdened” by the abundance of profiles on dating apps.

Where abundance does exist, users must develop strategies for managing overwhelming choice (Best & Delmege, 2012; Chan, 2018). Illouz (2012) situates partner selection in a historical trajectory: whereas in pre-modern societies, the choice of a partner was a collective decision (e.g. involving the family), it has since become individualized (following your heart) while also rationalized (making a calculated decision). And there is more at stake as late moderns are no longer satisfied with “good enough matches” but pursue “the perfect match” (Illouz, 2012, p. 179), which creates new pressures, uncertainties, and risks (Carter & Arocha, 2020). Dating apps offer tools (some available only at additional cost, Szulc et al., 2024) to make the process of partner selection efficient, for example, by relegating user agency to matchmaking algorithms (Elliot, 2023; Szulc et al., 2025). Yet, users continue to describe partner selection on dating apps as time-consuming (Essig, 2019), wearying (Best & Delmege, 2012), and boring (Narr & Luong, 2023). Experiences of ghosting, rejections, and disappointments exacerbate frustration, leading De Ridder (2022) to argue that while dating apps may reduce anxiety, they also “sustain and intensify feelings of loneliness, isolation and alienation” (p. 605).

One key way of streamlining the matchmaking process is to partition dating app users into discrete, often predefined, attributes such as age, weight, or ethnicity. This atomization of individuals enables granular filtering through potential partners but takes away what Illouz (2007) calls charm, that is, “the ways in which various attributes are integrated with each other and contextually performed” (pp. 104–105). Matchmaking thus becomes increasingly rationalized, with people scrutinizing potential partners in more detail and continuously “narrowing, defining, and refining tastes” (Illouz, 2012, p. 182), even as norms and rules of dating grow uncertain (Illouz, 2019). Dating apps, however, usually provide limited information about potential partners, which prompts many users to seek additional cues outside the apps, for example, on Google or Instagram (Bandinelli & Gandini, 2022; Orchard, 2024). The atomization of individuals and rationalization of partner selection have been linked to feeling objectified, dehumanized, and interchangeable (Best & Delmege, 2012; De Ridder, 2022). Although some users find the gamified dating experience entertaining and pleasurable, providing a rush of dopamine, Lovink (2019, pp. 54–56) contrasts this immediate gratification with the longer-lasting melancholy of “techno-sadness.”

The negative emotions evoked by the issues of abundance and atomization on dating platforms may intensify when the platforms become the dominant way of finding partners. Research cautions against the growing dependency on dating apps. It is common to find in the scholarship statements asserting that “Meeting your mate online is increasingly the new normal” (Essig, 2019, p. 62), “dating via digital means is increasingly normalized” (Bandinelli & Gandini, 2022, p. 430), and that dating apps are “how ‘everyone’ meets nowadays” (Orchard, 2024, p. 3). Consequently, Bandinelli and Gandini (2022) speak of the platformization of intimacy and De Ridder (2022) of datafication of intimacy, the latter underlining the “dependency on data-driven media for finding love” (original emphasis, p. 594). Similarly, Cassidy (2016) examines “participatory reluctance” among young gay men in Brisbane who felt like they had no choice but to use Gaydar, now an outdated gay dating site, even if they were dissatisfied with it.

Without denying the widespread uptake of dating apps in many places around the world, my analysis foregrounds the complexities of user agency, not only in how they find alternative ways of meeting partners but also in how they remain critical about dating apps, use them creatively, and resist some of their affordances, which affects how using dating apps makes them feel. I employ agency as a conceptual tool (rather than a concluding argument, simply demonstrating that “dating app users have agency,” Thomas, 2016) to resist the claims of emotional technological determinism. I am interested in the practices of dating app use and the emotions that the apps do or do not elicit. My findings suggest that while participants expressed disappointment, frustration, and anger with various dating apps and their users, these feelings about dating apps (and the dating cultures they help create) did not automatically translate into participants themselves feeling sad. This leads me to distinguish between “sad dating apps”—acknowledging the commodification of intimacy through technological, economic, and social structures governing digital dating—and “sad dating app users”—a popular yet flawed assumption that dating apps make their users feel sad by design.

Methods, Participants, and Ethics

This article draws on 30 semi-structured interviews with Polish LGBTQs in the United Kingdom, which I conducted between late 2018 and early 2019 in Polish, English, or a hybrid of the two (Ponglish). Before the interviews, I launched an online survey in mid-2018, targeting individuals who (1) identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or otherwise non-normative in terms of gender and/or sexuality; (2) currently or previously held Polish citizenship; and (3) resided in the United Kingdom at the time of the survey (for details, see Szulc, 2019). The survey generated 767 valid responses, and 334 respondents expressed willingness to participate in a follow-up, face-to-face interview. The interviews were conducted in locations chosen by participants, most often in their homes, cafés, or at the university. They lasted on average 2 hr, and interviewees received £45 each in recognition of their time and to compensate for the associated expenses. Interview topics included identity, migration experiences, and social media use. Participants were asked about their current and past dating experiences, including the use of dating apps, and what they thought and how they felt about them.

All interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed in NVivo. I employed thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2012), generating two complementary sets of codes: technology-centered codes (e.g. “Grindr,” “Tinder”) and issue-centered codes (e.g. “scarcity of partners,” “alternatives to digital dating”). This dual approach enabled analysis of the role of specific platforms while also identifying broader patterns of use across platforms. To preserve attention to participants’ lived experiences, I produced one-paragraph biographical summaries for each interviewee, outlining key details of their personal circumstances and dating practices, for example, their simultaneous use of multiple dating platforms (see also Wu & Trottier, 2021). These short biographies were a valuable tool for maintaining a people-centered and context-sensitive perspective (Leurs, 2017), which foregrounded participants’ agency. Interviews were analyzed in their original language, and all quotations included here are my translations unless originally given in English.

While selecting interviewees from the 334 survey respondents, I prioritized diversity of participants to reflect varied life experiences. I interviewed 11 cis gay men, 7 cis lesbian women, 4 gender-diverse people, 2 cis bisexual women, 2 queer trans men, 1 cis pansexual woman, 1 lesbian trans woman, 1 bisexual trans woman, and 1 straight trans woman. Ages ranged from 19 to the mid-50s: half were aged 19–29 in 2018, 10 were in their 30s, 4 in their 40s, and 1 was in his 50s. Sixteen interviewees had completed higher education, 13 only secondary education, and 1 only primary education. Geographically, 23 participants were based in England, 4 in Scotland and 3 in Northern Ireland, living both in large urban centers (e.g. London, Edinburgh, Belfast) and in smaller cities or towns (e.g. Slough, Musselburgh, Newry). All interviewees were white. Only two participants had never used dating sites or apps; the remainder reported varied practices, ranging from sporadic use of a single dating platform in the past to heavy use of multiple dating platforms at the time of the interview.

I position myself as part of the in-group: I am a cis Polish queer man who moved to the United Kingdom in 2016. My fluency in Polish, English, and Ponglish, as well as my familiarity with Polish queer and popular culture, and my dating experience in both contexts, facilitated building rapport with participants. At the same time, this positionality introduced challenges linked to taken-for-granted cultural knowledge. My age, gender, sexuality, and education also influenced the connections I was able to build, but I consistently worked to create a welcoming, non-judgmental atmosphere in which participants felt comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives. For this reason, and in line with feminist and queer research ethics (England, 1994), I occasionally shared aspects of my own experience when explicitly asked by participants. To protect anonymity, all interviewees are referred to using pseudonyms created specifically for this article, ensuring they cannot be cross-identified across multiple publications (Fox et al., 2021). Ethical approval for this project was granted by the Ethics Committee of the London School of Economics and Political Science, where I was based during the research.

Abundance: Partner Scarcity

While studies centered on predominantly heterosexual, middle-class populations in Western cities (e.g. De Ridder, 2022; Essig, 2019; Illouz, 2007, 2012, 2019; Narr & Luong, 2023) highlight the inconveniences of an online overabundance of dating partners, for many queers, simply identifying others “like us” provides a crucial form of validation. As Gross (1998) observes, LGBTQ people “are rarely born in minority communities in which parents or siblings share our minority status” (p. 90), a circumstance that can foster feelings of isolation. Sam, a non-binary person in their twenties, recalled creating an anonymous account on a popular gay men-oriented dating app, Grindr, while still in Poland:

[I wanted] to see if there were other people in the area, to see if I was the only queer person. It turned out I was. There was no one else on the entire campus. I was the only one. The first people [on the grid] were kilometers away. So, that was sad.

By contrast, Paulina, a cis lesbian woman in her twenties, described joining the popular Polish LGBT+ portal, Innastrona.pl (later renamed Queer.pl), after moving to the United Kingdom:

Suddenly, the internet world opened to me, and it was the rainbow world. [. . .] It was nice. I created a profile, and everybody could see it. And I could see the profiles of other girls and flirt with them. For me, this was the first actual contact with the LGBT community.

For both Sam and Paulina, the abundance of potential partners on dating platforms was not a problem. Sam found sad the scarcity rather than the abundance of profiles when Grindr’s geolocation feature revealed no nearby users. For Paulina, seeing other queer women on Innastrona.pl, even though most members were based in a different country, excited her and translated into a sense of belonging that had been missing from her life.

Sam’s and Paulina’s contrasting experiences illustrate not only the special importance of locating fellow queers through dating platforms but also how different technological affordances influence users’ feelings. Sam felt isolated using a geolocation-based app that showed the closest profiles kilometers away, while Paulina was excited to see many registered profiles on a queer website, which allowed but did not require filtering profiles by location. The distinction between global dating apps and Polish dating sites proved to be important for interviewees, especially when they were interested in dating other Polish queers in the United Kingdom, and serves as a reminder of the continuous importance of dating sites. Paweł, a cis gay man in his 20s, similarly highlighted the affordances of different platforms. He preferred to date Poles when in the United Kingdom, as he felt he could build a more meaningful connection with them. While he used geolocation-based Grindr for quick hook-ups in his medium-sized UK city, he relied on the Polish gay dating site Fellow.pl for finding dates. Like Queer.pl, Fellow.pl allows users to see many registered profiles and filter them by location. Although Fellow.pl displayed only two profiles in his city, Paweł was willing to travel and eventually began dating someone from Manchester. His ability to switch between platforms and travel for dates demonstrates how users creatively navigate the scarcity and abundance of particular profiles to exercise agency and reduce disappointment.

Paweł’s case also underscores the role of socioeconomic privilege, as he could afford to travel to other places in the United Kingdom, which was additionally enabled by a relatively well-developed public transport system in a country that is not very large. When Paulina’s parents decided to move from Poland to a medium-sized city in England when she was a teenager, she was excited about flirting with other queer women on Innastrona.pl, as described above, but she did not have many prospects of meeting them face-to-face. She was “young and desperate,” as she put it, and ended up dating the only other lesbian available on Innastrona.pl in her city. While other research points to the scarcity of profiles on dating apps for some queer women and queers based outside big cities (Duguay, 2019; McKearney, 2021), Paulina’s experience highlights the intersectionality of multiple factors in this respect: in her case, being a young Polish lesbian, still dependent on her parents, who was based in a medium-sized English city and wanted to connect with other Polish queer women. This constrained but did not negate her agency. After learning about Brighton’s vibrant LGBTQ community, Paulina moved there for her studies and met a girlfriend at the university.

Other participants pointed to additional barriers limiting their pool of potential partners on dating apps, for example, ageism (Janusz, a cis gay man in his 50s), sexualization of trans women (Bożena, a trans bisexual woman in her 30s), and perpetuation of beauty ideals (Ari, a non-binary gay in their 20s). At the time of the interview, Ari was based in London and was a heavy user of multiple dating apps. While they could not complain about the abundance of queers in the city, they detested many of them:

Most people use Grindr for a quick sex date, but it’s not an option for me. It’s because Grindr is an app for what I call “mainstream gays,” who are not interested in me because they think that I’m too fat for them or I don’t take care of myself, which is totally untrue.

Ari continued using Grindr, considering it useful for finding accommodation and buying marijuana. To find friends, dates, and sex, they used gay bear-specific and kink-welcoming apps, including Growlr, BiggerCity, and Recon, which however had a significant user base only in “gay capitals:” “When you log in on Growlr in Warsaw, you get 20 users, when you log in here [in London], you get 20 users within 100 meters.” For Ari, Grindr’s abundance of profiles was irrelevant, since mainstream users often excluded them due to fatphobia. Instead, they appropriated the app for other purposes while turning to niche apps to fulfill their social and sexual needs, which was possible because Ari lived in London.

Taken together, these narratives complicate the notion that dating apps universally produce an overwhelming abundance of partners. Multiple factors intersect—including age, gender, sexuality, location, public services, technological affordances, language proficiency, dating goals, and beauty ideals—limiting the pool of potential partners and imposing constraints on agency. Yet participants consistently found ways to exercise agency: by appropriating mainstream dating apps, using alternative dating apps or Polish dating sites, or traveling to meet partners. It remains difficult to know exactly how participants felt about navigating between the abundance and scarcity of potential partners. Most recounted their experiences in a matter-of-fact manner, largely using unemotional language. Sam was the only participant who mentioned that they found the scarcity of queers in their vicinity sad, but they did not say that this made them feel sad. Ari expressed frustration with fatphobia on Grindr, but this anger was directed at mainstream gay culture rather than automatically making them feel unhappy. While I do not negate the possibility of feeling sad because of the online abundance or scarcity of potential partners, these findings complicate the assumption that the abundance of partners made visible on dating platforms inevitably provokes sadness. In the following section, I confront the idea of the abundance of profiles on dating apps with the scarcity of information available about potential partners, focusing on issues of filtering and atomization.

Atomization: Charm Offensive

Best and Delmege (2012) argue that “filtering through the many options, partners and choices offered by online dating sites is a prime concern in online dating” (p. 238; see also Chan, 2018; Essig, 2019), assuming the actual abundance of dating profiles. Several participants admitted using dating app affordances to filter in and out potential partners, based on characteristics such as height and “ethnicity” (Kamil, a cis gay man in his thirties), age (Tomasz, a cis gay man in his twenties), or weight-related communities (e.g. the “chub” category on Scruff, Ari) (see also Boston, 2016). Filtering can be understood as both discriminatory (excluding those deemed “undesirable”) or empowering (allowing those deemed “undesirable” to avoid disappointing encounters). In either case, filtering atomizes people by reducing them to particular attributes that one finds important. Drawing on Illouz’s (2007) framework, one might argue that such practices deprive individuals of the opportunity to charm one another. Interviewees generally discussed filtering without emotional intensity. Often, they emphasized the agency such affordances created for them—particularly in large cities or when navigating multiple marginalizations.

At the same time, filtering options provoked some confusion and disappointment. Confusion arose when interviewees found the predefined interface categories ambiguous or illogical. For example, Janusz was uncertain whether the category “married” on Romeo, a German gay men-oriented dating platform popular in Poland, referred to marriage with a man or a woman, while Kamil was puzzled by Grindr’s “ethnicity” options, which combined racial identifiers (e.g. “Black”) with geographical terms (e.g. “Middle Eastern”) (see also Shield, 2019). Disappointment was more often tied to clashes between platform design and personal values. Binary gender categories were particularly criticized (see also Szulc, 2020): Sam rejected them on Queer.pl, while Mikołaj, a queer trans man in his thirties, found them inadequate on a mainstream dating platform, Plenty of Fish:

When I indicated that I’m interested in women and men, all the women I got were hetero [. . .] I don’t care about gender, but I’m into queer people [. . .] and the algorithm didn’t get it.

Other participants described similar frustrations: Paulina found the “other” gender option “unpleasant,” Monika (a cis bisexual woman in her twenties) disliked narrow sexual orientation options (limited to “gay,” “lesbian,” and “bi”), and Ari considered the very ability to filter profiles based on “ethnicity” racist. These technological disappointments could be considered a form of sadness originating in unmet expectations, but it is clear that for interviewees, this translated more into frustration with dating platforms rather than making them feel sad.

Although filtering was relatively common, many participants also sought additional information about potential partners outside dating platforms, particularly when pursuing more than casual sex (see also Suenzo, 2024). Prior research reports on deceptive dating profiles that particularly queer women have to sort through, including those of straight men posing as women, straight women seeking friendship, or straight couples looking for sexual encounters (Ferris & Duguay, 2020). In this context, external verification becomes a strategy for protecting queer spaces. Natalia, a cis pansexual woman in her teens, verified Tinder profiles by checking people’s music interests on Spotify (if it was linked to their accounts), looking for queer artists such as Girl in Red, Panic!, and Years and Years. For her, this not only verified queerness but also revealed musical tastes, which she found “telling.” Others similarly cross-checked potential partners’ Spotify, Snapchat, or Instagram accounts to learn about their interests, tastes, and values. Michał, a cis gay man in his twenties, used the Scruff dating app to gather more personal information about people he first encountered on Grindr, since Scruff allowed longer self-descriptions. These practices illustrate the tension between using filters to atomize individuals for efficient partner selection and the desire for more holistic understandings of others that resists dehumanization and reduces dissatisfaction.

Significantly, Polish dating sites facilitated more expansive self-presentation than many global dating apps. Katarzyna, a cis lesbian teenager, contrasted Tinder’s profile brevity with Queer.pl’s affordances: “On Tinder, you have a limited number of characters, so you need to be precise and think about the most important thing you want to say. And on Queer.pl, you can write at length.” Wiktor, a cis gay man in his twenties, imagined his ideal dating app as a hybrid of Facebook (with detailed information about “interests and views”) and Grindr (based on geolocation). Indeed, Polish queer portals such as Queer.pl and Kobiety Kobietom blend social media and dating platforms functionalities, allowing users to provide more information about themselves, share posts, comment on news, and list favorite books and films alongside dating profiles. Such affordances were welcomed by participants and contrast with what Bandinelli and Gandini (2022) describe as “‘ready-made’ social capital” (p. 425) on global dating apps, where limited information and casual connections prevent the accumulation of social capital. The functionalities of Polish dating sites resonate with other non-US platforms such as the Chinese apps Blued (renamed HeeSay) and Aloha (renamed Fanka), which also enable diverse ways of accumulating social capital, for example, through livestreaming (Wang, 2020; Wu & Trottier, 2021). As Sundén et al. (2024) argue, attention to locally operating platforms is crucial to provide a critical counterpoint to digital technologies originating in the United States. Polish dating sites offer distinctly different affordances to global dating apps, while the latter tend to be taken as emblematic of the entire digital dating experience when evaluating its emotional impact.

Overall, participants’ use of filters illustrates how atomization of people advances the promise of efficient partner selection. Filtering through potential partners based on discreet attributes or relegating matchmaking to algorithms prevents people from appreciating each other more holistically or, in Illouz’s (2007) words, charming each other. This has been linked to feeling objectified and dehumanized (Best & Delmege, 2012; De Ridder, 2022). At times, filtering gave interviewees a stronger sense of agency; other times, it made them confused about or disappointed with dating apps’ interfaces. However, it did not necessarily produce sadness among interviewees; rather, it evoked other negative emotions, such as frustration with technological design, pointing to a critical and reflective attitude toward dating apps rather than self-victimizing feelings that the apps arguably trigger. Importantly, many countered atomization by actively seeking additional information about others, either to verify their queerness or to develop a fuller picture of potential partners. Polish dating sites facilitated this process more effectively than many global dating apps, complicating arguments about the scarcity of information on dating platforms. In the final empirical section, I challenge the notion of widespread dependence on dating apps, which implies the near inevitability of sadness as a consequence of overreliance on these technologies.

Dependency: Dating Alternatives

Dependency on dating apps is not directly linked to making dating app users feel sad. However, scholarship on abundance and atomization in digital dating often highlights growing reliance on these apps (Bandinelli & Gandini, 2022; De Ridder, 2022; Essig, 2019), which in itself reduces agency and may amplify what Lovink (2019) terms “techno-sadness.” Several studies note that users temporarily disconnect from dating apps, in a belief that they “don’t work,” or continue using them reluctantly (Brubaker et al., 2016; Cassidy, 2016). Some interviewees expressed similar sentiments. Kamil described Grindr as “a necessary evil,” remarking that “it never leads to anything; in my experience, people don’t reply to messages.” Eli and Patrycja, both cis queer women in their twenties, complained about matching with others on Tinder without anyone starting the conversation. Even those who have never used dating apps, like Agata (a cis bisexual woman in her twenties), acknowledged the reliance on digital technology, joking about the consequences of her non-use of dating apps: “That’s why I’ll die alone, me and my cats.” Several interviewees also suggested that queer people depend on dating apps more than heterosexuals because of persistent social prejudice (see also Ross-Nadié & Duguay, 2019). As Paweł put it: “Who would approach a guy at a bus stop, even here in England, and say: ‘I like you. Do you want to go on a date?’ I don’t think that would work. We’re left with clubs and the internet.”

Without negating the great popularity of dating apps, which interviewees also recognized, it is important to emphasize that digital dating includes diverse dating platforms, which reduces reliance on a particular site or app, and provides alternative avenues for asserting agency. Many interviewees used multiple dating apps and relied on alternative dating platforms, both global and local, for establishing connections. For example, as discussed in the previous section, Ari found more welcoming communities on Growlr, BiggerCity, and Recon than on Grindr. Others favored Polish dating sites, which they found more rewarding than global dating apps because they provided more holistic portrayals of others, including information about their interests, views, and values. The viability of such alternatives, however, depended on achieving a critical mass of users. Patrycja observed: “On Tinder, it’s like ‘Great, we’ve matched!’ but nobody talks. [. . .] I think people talk more on Her [a popular dating app for queer women],” adding that “Tinder is more popular, not many people use Her yet [. . .] So you end up scrolling through the same profiles all the time. It’s boring.” Interviewees also reappropriated mainstream apps for purposes beyond dating—for example, Ari used Grindr to find accommodation and buy marijuana—or turned to social media for dating, such as Natalia, who arranged a date after liking another woman’s Instagram post with a rainbow flag.

Consistent with prior research (Brubaker et al., 2016; Cassidy, 2016; Wu & Trottier, 2021), participants often used different services for different dating goals, particularly distinguishing between sexual encounters and romantic relationships. Much of the interviewees’ criticism of dating apps stemmed from their association with hook-ups. Dariusz, a cis gay man in his thirties, called dating apps “sex machines:” “They stopped being ‘dating’ portals a long time ago. They’re now more often used for quick dates, quick sex.” Sylwia and Dorota, both cis lesbian women in their thirties, similarly criticized Badoo, a popular mainstream dating platform, for its focus on sex. Nevertheless, Sylwia met her ex-girlfriend on Badoo and Dorota used it along with Kobiety Kobietom, a portal for Polish queer women; the latter to pursue more meaningful connections. Wiktor and Tomasz distinguished between Grindr (for hook-ups) and Tinder (for dates), while Paweł, who sought a life partner, contrasted Grindr with Fellow.pl, explaining that “You won’t find a boyfriend on Grindr. On Grindr, you can find fun [sex].” Yet, as he added, he still used Grindr because “everyone has their needs, including me, and this app works well for such ‘emergencies.’”

Interestingly, the distinction between dating platforms better suited for sex or love often aligned with apps’ technological affordances as well as cultural assumptions, sometimes the two intersecting and reinforcing each other. Participants tended to associate global apps that afforded limited opportunities for self-presentation with quick sexual encounters, while Polish platforms with social media-like functionalities were considered as more effective for building a long-term relationship. This, at times, aligned with cultural assumptions, associating British culture with sex and Polish culture with love. Natalia, for example, made a distinction between “British Tinder” and “Polish Tinder,” the former “more focused on one-night stands” and “more vulgar,” in her opinion. Interviewees also turned to Polish dating platforms when their goal was to build a relationship with another Pole, as was the case with Paweł, who could only imagine dating a person from the same cultural background and a native speaker of Polish. The navigation across different dating platforms and different contexts in which they are used, despite the assumptions made about them, indicates purposeful and strategic use of technology, which extends agency—albeit within some limits.

Importantly, some interviewees highlighted the continuing relevance of offline dating practices. Dorota met her ex-girlfriend at a party, Paulina met her girlfriend in class, and Krzysztof (a cis gay man in his forties) met his partner through a friend. Wiktor preferred meeting people face-to-face as it was important for him to see how people “communicate nonverbally, with their eyes, their gestures, their tone of voice.” In contrast to the atomization thesis, the appreciation of nonverbal communication underscores how embodied, non-digital interactions allow for more holistic impressions of potential partners. These offline dating practices could be easily ignored in research focused exclusively on one dating app, or even on dating apps more generally. Despite the great popularity of digital dating and its special importance for queer individuals (Ross-Nadié & Duguay, 2019; Smith, 2022), there exist many digital and non-digital alternatives for meeting potential partners and navigating through them should be recognized as a form of asserting agency, which may reduce the emotional toll that a particular dating app could have on its users. While digital dating was central to many participants’ intimate lives, they adapted and diversified their dating practices rather than—as suggested by many—resigned themselves to the inevitability of letting dating apps make them feel sad.

Conclusion

The central aim of this article is to challenge grim cultural diagnoses that portray dating apps as inherently making their users feel sad. My findings partially support critiques of “sad dating apps,” but they cast doubt on the idea of “sad dating app users.” For-profit global dating apps certainly contribute to the commodification of intimacy by presenting an illusion of free choice among abundant potential partners and by providing tools to atomize people, while many strongly depend on the apps for finding partners. From a cultural studies perspective, this could be considered sad and would justify speaking of “sad dating apps” as a critique of their dominance and of their business models and operating logics. Yet, users do not simply succumb to technological and market imperatives. Rather, they develop creative strategies to assert agency—by reappropriating apps, using them purposefully, and navigating among diverse online and offline ways of dating. While interviewees expressed complex negative emotions regarding digital dating cultures, I found little evidence that these emotions translated into them feeling sad solely because of how dating apps work. This challenges the idea of sad dating app users. The disappointment, frustration, and anger with dating platforms—their interfaces, algorithms, and users—that interviewees expressed are better understood as agential feelings that indicate emotional critical reflection rather than hopeless techno-sadness.

As noted in the Introduction, sadness is a complicated and capacious emotion, which could mean different things to people at different times and in different contexts, and it does not necessarily preclude moments of excitement. Paasonen (2021) foregrounds this ambiguity in her theorization of networked media’s “affective formations,” that is, multistranded amalgamations of co-existing feelings. In this sense, disappointment, frustration, and anger with (digital) dating cultures that participants expressed may well translate into elusive feelings of sadness, the exact source of which may be difficult to pin down. Moreover, sadness can itself be agential, provoking introspection, signaling resistance, and motivating action (Wollen in Watson, 2015). I do not deny those possibilities. My argument, however, is that sadness does not stem straightforwardly from the design of dating apps, as Lovink (2019) and Orchard (2024) explicitly argue. Following Paasonen (2021), I caution against grim reductive generalizations—“at the expense of the micro, contextual nuances, contradictions, and ambiguities” (p. 6)—that strip dating app users of agency over their feelings and simplify complex emotional amalgamations that dating apps can elicit, trigger, or foreclose.

These reductive generalizations tend to be sustained by cultural diagnoses drawn from observations about the use of global dating apps by relatively privileged users. My findings demonstrate that it is easier to sustain the idea of “sad dating app users” when research focuses on heterosexual middle-class people based in Western cities and is limited to a handful of mainstream dating apps that do not substantially differ from one another. By centering the experiences of queer migrants, I show that dating apps do not provide everyone with the same abundance of potential partners and that the atomization of people occurs to a different extent on different dating platforms, with a clear distinction between global dating apps and Polish dating sites. Dependency on dating apps is often overstated, and those skillful in multiple languages, as migrants often are, have access to a more diverse pool of global and local dating platforms.

This underscores the importance of in-depth qualitative research with marginalized communities—such as queer migrants, as well as those marginalized by age, race, class, disability, or other intersecting factors—that is people-centered and context-sensitive (Leurs, 2017), to challenge dominant imaginaries of how dating apps make their users feel. While such scholarship already exists (for reviews of queer dating app studies, including those beyond the West, see, for example, Smith, 2022; Wu & Ward, 2018), it rarely enters the ranks of the zeitgeist diagnoses à la Bauman (2003) and Illouz (2007, 2012, 2019) but also Lovink (2019) and Orchard (2024). Structural hierarchies of global academia and the politics of contextualization (Chan et al., 2021) often relegate them to the realm of particularity, while authors centering privileged users and contexts or drawing solely on theoretical reflections tend to ignore the specificities of their arguments or get away with brief statements about their focus, while they achieve influence through universalizing claims.

More broadly, this article contributes to discussions on technology, emotions, and agency. Emotions themselves have histories and may rise and drop in popularity (Frevert, 2024). Segal (2017) highlights contemporary preoccupations with sadness in its many forms (e.g. anxiety and depression) and its opposite feeling of happiness. Dating apps promise happiness by streamlining the search for romantic love and fulfilling sex (which are entwined with the idea of happiness, Segal, 2017, p. xii), while journalists and scholars often argue that the same apps end up making their users sad. Both claims rest on technologically deterministic assumptions. While Internet researchers have become more careful in avoiding technologically deterministic arguments when assessing technologies’ general impact or their “effects,” crude claims about how technologies make their users feel continue to circulate. I refer to this as emotional technological determinism, which underpins arguments suggesting that dating apps make us sad (Lovink, 2019; Orchard, 2024), social media make us lonely (Turkle, 2011), and smartphones make us anxious (Haidt, 2024). My research demonstrates instead that users exercise considerable agency in this respect, and delineates the forms, scales, and scopes of feelings, sometimes contradictory, that technologies provoke, which technologies provoke what feelings, and for whom. Emotions themselves can be more or less agential, and the agency over how one feels when interacting with technology is distributed between technologies, users, and contexts.